A number of businesses and other organizations provide contact centers in which a plurality of personnel answer calls, such as telephone calls or other inquiries, e.g. from potential or existing customers. Contact centers serve a number of functions including facilitating the placement of orders for goods or services, providing information about products or the status of orders, receiving customer complaints or suggestions, dispensing product or technical information to assist customers in selecting or using products or services and the like.
Many such contact centers are configured so that the telephone or other communications facilities manned by the contact center personnel are coupled via a computer controlled system, e.g. for routing calls to available agents or other personnel. In the past, some such systems have included devices for facilitating supervision and/or monitoring the performance of such agents. For example, some devices are configured to collect, store, and/or analyze statistical data, while others store actual call recordings to be later analyzed and/or scored by contact center supervisors.
While previous systems of this type for facilitating supervision of contact center agents may have been adequate in many situations, they are not adequate to ensure that the scores assigned to the agent communications by contact center supervisors follow a standardized baseline. For instance, if one communication receives scores from different supervisors ranging from awful to excellent, then the entire monitoring system is defective. Additionally, if the average score assigned to all monitored communications within a time frame varies greatly, then the contact center manager loses the ability to evaluate the performance of the contact center agents, both collectively an individually, over time. However, if compliance with a baseline for scoring communications is enforced, then the accuracy of the assigned scores will be improved and the efficiency of the monitoring segment of a contact center will be drastically increased. Not only will a contact center manager realize increased accuracy, but the requirement to monitor a large number of communications to get an accurate indicator of an agent's performance will be eliminated. Therefore, there is a need for further improvement in the current ways in which agent communication scoring is handed.